Sunday, May 12, 2013

heart vs. character

Lawrence Lipking is one of those few academic literary
critics who one can read for enjoyment. I’ve been thinking lately about an
essay he wrote a decade ago on literary criticism and chess. I commented upon it in LI at the time, and I just returned to it. It is still a well wrought thing. Lipking writes a
lot about chess, since he is a grand master as well as a surviving member of what used to be the upper echelon of
the lit crit establishment. The essay, Chess Minds and Critical Moves, mixes
the field of literary criticism and chess, using Lipking’s own experience in
playing William Wimsatt as an example.

“Nevertheless, a great gulf separated the two of us: he was a problemist, I was
a player. The distinction between these habits of mind is so fundamental that,
like yin and yang, it can be used to divide the whole intellectual world into
contrary pairs -- for
example, Plato the problemist and Aristotle the player, or Being and Becoming.
The problemist seeks perfection of form and idea (or "theme"), and arranges
the pieces artistically to realize that theme in the purest and most elegant
way. The player seeks the excitement of a constantly shifting struggle against
a recalcitrant foe, and subordinates considerations of beauty and style to the
most efficient method of winning. A move is best, for the problemist, when most
ingenious; for the player, when most advantageous. A problemist needs to be
original; a player needs to be tough. In
practice, to be sure, the two habits of mind often mingle. Most problemists
also play games, and most players sometimes solve problems. Yet Wimsatt was not
at all a strong player, and difficult problems usually baffle me. “

For myself, this passage put a silver ball in motion. Bing
bing bing, it touched all the lights. My early intellectual life, really up
until around 35, was spent under the problemist spell. I actually considered
myself a maker of formal structures, of interesting problems with multiple
solutions. This attracted me to philosophy, even to the rather disastrous
decision to spend yearsin a graduate
school in philosophy. Philosophy in the anglosphere is usually divided under
the old Cold War categories of analytic and Continental, but Lipking’s division
seems more pertinent. There were analytics and Continentals who looked for the
ingenius move, and viewed the solution to a problem as an irritant, a sort of
bell signaling the end of recess. And there were members of the same two groups
that viewed the problems as pests, and were all about solutions. For the analytics,
this ultimately meant computer science, and for the Continentals, it meant
religion or politics.

In my heart, I want to remain on the playground, but since the age of 35, I
have slowly come to understand my character better – and my character is not an
extension of my heart. My character is a limited thing, and it wants a limited
number of moves to a certain end. My character is a player.

Still, I am not an unmixed player. Oh heart, oh problem
seeking heart, tied to me as cans to a
dog’s tail – to get all Yeatsian about
it. The limits of the player’s world are not only defined by a strategic end
but, at least in my case, by boredom. Boredom is the revenge of my repressed
problem heart. It undermines my projects, to an extent.

Back to Lipking:
“To speak for myself, the deep pleasure of chess can rival the spell of
great music. In the best games there comes a moment - the one that Satan and
his Watch Fiends cannot find - when the balance of tensions in a position
reaches its climax and the mind is challenged to see through all the
ramifications. This is a dangerous moment for a player like me, because time
seems suspended while the analysis lasts, and the clock keeps ticking away.
When I indulge this luxury too much, time pressure will finally ruin me. But
the pleasure is usually worth it. Just as some critics gradually go to the
heart of a poem, surrendering to the process for its own sake rather than any
rewards that may follow, a chessplayer can savor a game whether winning or
losing. Both as a player and critic, I prize these moments of incredibly focused
attention. They do not last long in chess, unfortunately. Once the game is
over, its aftereffects do not linger and spread as they sometimes do with poems
and music. Chess draws on cognitive powers like those of the critic, but not on
the other capacities that a critic requires, where all the senses and feelings
come into play. Even a very good game does not tell us, like Rilke's Apollo, to
change our lives. But subject to that limitation, the pleasure of chess is
intense. Unlike Rilke's Apollo, it affirms unashamedly that the head is
important. “

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.